


stars don't fall for men

by lyricalprose (fairylights)



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-10
Updated: 2014-03-10
Packaged: 2018-01-15 06:46:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1295368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairylights/pseuds/lyricalprose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>That man had laughed when she pressed her knife to his belly – <i>laughed</i>, and growled, “for a southron girl, there’s sure somethin’ of the wolf about you.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	stars don't fall for men

**Author's Note:**

> Doctor Who + Game of Thrones fusion. 
> 
> (Don't look at me, I don't know what I'm doing either).

“You’re _completely_ mad, aren’t you?”  
  
The man – _the Doctor_ , he’d said, _it’s a word from Essos_ , he’d said – shakes his head, less as an answer and more as a way to wring the dirty water from his hair and clothes. He looks like a drowned rat, soaked to the bone from their unplanned jaunt into the Blackwater, with his brown hair and incongruously fine clothes plastered close to his skin.  
  
Of course, Rose rather doubts she looks much better – she has, after all, just finished dragging herself from the water, and her dress feels about three times heavier than normal, weighed down from their adventure’s unexpected watery end.

“Well, I’m no Mad King,” he replies good-naturedly, “but it’s been suggested, once or twice.”  
  
“No Mad King, no,” Rose admits, “but you _did_ burn down my shop.”  
  
The Doctor shrugs, then flops down onto the shore to sit next to her, a sprawling heap of wet clothes and long limbs. “I had a good reason. You know that. Not my fault the gold cloaks didn’t seem to believe me.”  
  
The sun is setting over the Narrow Sea, a glowing ball of orange and yellow slowly bleeding into the ink of the ocean. You can see it clearly here, in a way you can’t from inside the walls of King’s Landing, and Rose wonders, not for the first time, if the cities across the water are better or worse than the one she’s grown up in.  
  
“I ought to go home,” she says a few moments later, into the still, quiet air off this far bank of the Blackwater. “It’s late. My mum – she’ll worry, if I’m not back through the gates before the gold cloaks close them for the night.”  
  
“Or–” The Doctor clears his throat and nods, once, before he sets his shoulders and continues to speak. “Or you could come with me.”  
  
Rose tries not to gape when she asks “ _What?_ ” – and tries not to sound flustered when she rushes to add, quickly and firmly, “I’m not – not a camp follower, or a whore, if that’s what you’re looking for.”  
  
The Doctor flushes, looking as flustered as she feels, and splutters, “No, no, not like – Rose, I wouldn’t–“  
  
She shouldn’t believe him, no matter how much she wants to. She shouldn’t want to say _yes._  
  
She doesn’t even know his name.  
  
 _The Doctor_ , he’d told her, when she’d asked who he was. Like it was a title she ought to recognize – the Sword of the Morning, the Kingslayer, _the Doctor._ It’s hardly a proper name, and she’d told him so while they’d been running from the gold cloaks earlier that day, crouched in an alcove off the Street of Seeds, hissing her disbelief into his ear while they huddled together against the red stone.  
  
 _Says the girl named after a flower_ , he’d scoffed.  
  
“I can’t,” she says quietly, and his face falls, the flush she’d rather liked the look of quickly receding from his cheeks. “I’ve got – there’s my mum, and I – I just can’t.”  
  
He walks her back to the Mud Gate. It’s a long walk, and for the most part they’re silent – he doesn’t try to change her mind, doesn’t wheedle or bargain or ask her again.  
  
At least, not until she’s halfway through the Mud Gate.  
  
(He barely makes it through the question before she’s turned on her heel and bolted back through the gate).  
  
—-  
  
Sometimes Rose wonders if the Doctor might be highborn.  
  
It’s not because he sounds it. He’s got the same sort of generic, lowborn accent she does, all clipped vowels and easy slang. There’s nothing lordly about his excitable, babbling voice, except perhaps the sheer depth and breadth of the vocabulary it expresses. Rose has yet to hear of a language that the Doctor can’t speak. Braavosi, Dothraki, High Valyrian – he seems to know them _all_. Rose can’t even begin to parse most foreign words and phrases, apart from ones like _yes_ and _no_ and _not at that price_ , things she’s heard at market. But every time the Doctor opens his mouth to speak, he makes the words _dance_ , as though he’s never known another tongue.  
  
And there’s just – _something._ Something about the way he holds himself sometimes, when it looks like there’s going to be trouble. The way his back straightens and stiffens, makes him seem even taller than he already is. The way his eyes go cold enough to freeze even a black brother’s blood.  
  
The way he says _don’t touch her_ and people _listen_ , even though he doesn’t – _won’t_ – carry a sword.  
  
So Rose wonders. She wonders if he’s highborn or not – if he’s a jaded second son, or a well-treated bastard who just got bored of bowing and scraping and squiring. She wonders if he might be a maester who lost his chain, or a septon who broke his vows. She wonders if he has a family, somewhere out there, or if he’s always been as lonely as he seems to be now. She wonders if he’s the Stranger, come to walk in the dust with the mortals.  
  
She wonders, more and more every day, if any of that matters.  
  
—-  
  
Rose takes to carrying knives, not long after they start traveling together.  
  
Swords are too large and unwieldy, and she’d have no clue where to start with one, honestly. But knives – knives, she can use. Knives she can hide in the folds of a dress (though she doesn’t wear those much anymore) or keep hidden away in her boot. Knives are easy to sharpen and throw and replace, and knives are easier to slip between a man’s ribs, if it absolutely has to come to that.  
  
The world beyond Flea Bottom is huge and strange and wonderful, yes – but it’s not always pretty, and the Doctor can’t always be there. Like he isn’t there for the man at the Neck, the one with teeth like a beast’s, gnarled and sharp, and nails so long they could’ve been claws, with ragged edges that scrape at her cheeks when he tries to touch her.  
  
That man had laughed when she pressed her knife to his belly – _laughed_ , and growled, “for a southron girl, there’s sure somethin’ of the wolf about you.”  
  
(He’d not thought the jape was so funny after her blade had broken skin).  
  
And then, a year after they put King’s Landing behind them, the fighting starts.  
  
They’ve been making their way north anyways, because the Doctor has insisted that she simply can’t die without ever seeing snow, and so the battles lie behind them, for the most part – and yet the land is gashed and bleeding still, wet with wolves’ and lions’ blood.  
  
They keep moving north, through the burned-out husks of towns and villages, helping where they can and running when they can’t.  
  
They are neither of them knights, neither of them kings, but there’s good they can do, all the same.  
  
—-  
  
They’re up past the Neck, in the North proper, when the red star – the _comet_ , the Doctor says it’s called – falls.  
  
The air and the ground are their inn tonight. Torrhen’s Square is still miles away, too far to reach before dark, and she is curled against the Doctor’s side on the bedroll – the one they’ve been sharing, lately, with the cold northern air as a convenient excuse.  
  
“Winter’s coming,” he says quietly, after the black of the sky has swallowed up the comet’s brief, bright red.  
  
“That what that means?” Rose asks, breath fogging in the air as she speaks.  
  
The Doctor doesn’t say anything, for a moment. Then he wraps an arm around her, pulling her close, and murmurs, “It means…storms. There’ll be storms coming, soon.”  
  
The wind picks up, then, and the chill in the air goes straight to Rose’s bones.


End file.
